By John Tompkins
The Brazosport Facts

Published December 09, 2007

BRAZORIA

Ashton Carmen said he tried to run away from home and his father.

The 14-year-old Pearland teen was waiting for his father to come home Dec. 8, 2005, so he could talk to him. The talk turned into an argument.

When Reginald Carmen, 50, tried to charge his son, Ashton Carmen said he pulled out his father’s pistol and fired, killing him.

“When I first stumbled upon the gun, I was going to take it with me for protection” on the streets, Carmen, now 16, said Monday through a glass window at the Clemens Unit near Brazoria. “The first thing I thought to do was to try and scare him. I didn’t have any true intentions of hurting him.”

Pearland police arrested Carmen for his father’s death after he confessed. He later was certified to stand trial as an adult.

“I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’” he said. “It’s still kind of confusing because I’d never dealt with anything like that.”

During a trial in January, Carmen told jurors after they convicted him that his father beat him and he twice had to be hospitalized.

The jury sentenced him to 50 years in prison.

Despite high-profile crimes by juveniles making headlines, stories like Carmen’s are becoming more rare in Texas, as the number of juveniles being treated as adults in the state’s legal system is falling while the level of arrests remains about the same.

‘No place for a kid’

Eduardo Rodriguez was 15 when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder. He was shocked to find himself in the adult prison system as opposed to the juvenile system.

When a youth is sentenced to adult prison, many rehabilitative measures are not available, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez also is doing time at the Clemens Unit, and is in his second year of his sentence. He is one of four men accused of beating 17-year-old Leodan Cruz in Rosharon with a baseball bat and a golf club June 19, 2005.

Prison is not a good environment to train or to rehabilitate somebody to function in the real world, he said.

“That ain’t no place for a kid,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like you’re just forgotten.”

Both Rodriguez and Carmen were 15 at the time they started serving their sentence.

Rodriguez’s feelings on juveniles in adult prison are shared by Diana Coates, who oversaw the youth offender program for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for seven years.

“Prison is not a good place to raise an adolescent,” she said.

Rodriguez declined to talk about the facts of his case and only wanted to discuss the nature of his imprisonment.

Boys among men

Though teens are sent to serve adult time in prison, they still are juveniles and must be educated, Coates said. While the juveniles are in the adult system, they attend classes every day and are able to obtain a high school equivalency diploma, she said.

Both Carmen and Rodriguez claim their punishment is unfair given they were both 14 at the time they committed their crimes. While awaiting trial, Carmen and Rodriguez were held at the Brazoria County Detention Center.

Sticking children that age in an adult system only makes it harder for them once they get out, Carmen said.

“Fourteen, 15, 16, 17 years old — that’s the time to be in school and make something of yourself,” he said. “Prison takes away that time altogether. Age isn’t going to change any of that.”

That is something Brazoria County District Attorney Jeri Yenne disputes. Though many juveniles are processed with rehabilitation in mind, some of the crimes they commit — such as murder — warrant adult punishment, she said.

“Does youth equate to being salvageable? No,” she said. “Many of the cases that we’d like to certify, we believe there’s a public safety danger.”

A judge decides whether to certify a juvenile offender as an adult, on the recommendation of a prosecutor. Though it is rarely done, it should be available to prosecutors for heinous offenses, Yenne said.

“I think there should be a variety of options,” she said.

Though there have been several thousand juvenile arrests in Brazoria County, there only have been a handful of adult certifications in the past 10 years, Yenne said

“We move to certify very few people,” she said.

Certified adults decline

Two years after his father’s death, Carmen sits at the Clemens Prison Unit wearing white offender’s top and pants. Wanting to be in the juvenile system as opposed to prison, Carmen said an appeal is his only hope of getting out.

“There’s really not much I can do about it at this point in time,” he said.

Over the past 10 years, the numbers have shown there are more juveniles sent to the Texas Youth Commission, but there are fewer like Carmen and Rodriguez, who are being certified as adults.

The Texas Juvenile Probation Commission reports the number of adult certifications of juveniles statewide has dropped from 467 in 1997 to 178 in 2005, the most recent statistics available, while the number of arrests has remained about the same.

The increase in numbers of offenders sent to the Texas Youth Commission, the state agency in charge of handling the state’s chronically delinquent and more serious juvenile offenders, has increased steadily in recent years.

The number of juveniles sent to the Texas Youth Commission from Brazoria County courts hovered at about 30 a year, though in 2007 it dropped to 13.

The drop followed a scandal at the youth commission in which officials were accused of mishandling several hundred allegations of sexual abuse, which led all six of the commission’s board members to resign in March.

Judges and juvenile officials in Brazoria County were hesitant to send juveniles to the youth commission while reforms were made at the agency, said attorney Jeff Purvis, who handles juvenile cases. The scandal led to several reforms at the commission, including additional training for employees, better tracking of complaints filed by juveniles and creation of a special prosecutor’s unit for the commission.

“Judges are never comfortable sending a kid to TYC,” he said. “Maybe there have been some attitude changes.”

Paradigm shift

Attitudes about how juveniles are treated in the justice system have changed in recent years, as numbers from the juvenile probation commission show, officials said.

“The pendulum just swung the other way,” Coates said. “Through the years, people started thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”

Much of the shift has come from officials realizing juveniles need rehabilitation more than punishment, said Nydia Thomas, deputy general counsel for the juvenile probation commission.

“There’s been more use of determinate sentencing,” she said.

Determinate sentencing was enacted in Texas in 1987 and allows judges to sentence juveniles to sentences beyond the age of 21 for up to 30 years. Before that, if a juvenile committed a crime and was tried in the juvenile system, they had to be released when they were 21.

Instead of locking juveniles up with little or no rehabilitation in prison, officials are trying to bring about change before the juveniles are released from prison or the juvenile system, Thomas said.

“The juvenile justice system is tailored toward the youthful offender,” Thomas said.

In 1995, the Legislature voted to increase the size of the youth commission to accept three times the number of offenders than it previously could, said Isela Gutierrez, juvenile justice initiative director for the non-profit advocacy group Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. The commission also started treating kids as adult offenders by doing things such as cutting their hair and giving them an inmate number, she said.

“It was a real definite decision to make the juvenile justice system tougher on kids,” she said. “It really did take on a theme of an adult system.”

Whether a juvenile is in the state prison system for aggravated robbery or murder, one thing the public should take into account is that most, if not all, of the youth offenders someday will be released, Coates said.

“Every one of them is getting out,” she said. “You’re probably making them worse by sending them to prison.”

Though rehabilitation efforts are stronger for young offenders in prison, it seems to have no effect during parole hearings, Coates said.

“Where the impact comes on their age is during a jury trial” she said, noting juries hesitate to give strong sentences to minors.

Kept to themselves

There are 117 offenders at the Clemens Unit who are 14 to 17 years old, Texas Depart-ment of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said.

“They’re housed separately,” he said. “They are showered and fed separately from the general population.”

During the day, the offenders attend classes for high school equivalency or vocational training in bricklaying, carpentry or computers, Clark said.

During the afternoons, the offenders attend cognitive intervention classes to help adjust their everyday behavior as well as substance-abuse classes, Clark said.

Though there is education inside the prison system for young offenders, it isn’t enough to prepare them, Rodriguez said.

“They don’t do it fully,” he said. “It really isn’t helping.”

Rodriguez and Carmen attend classes every day at the Clemens Unit.

Rodriguez said though he believed it’s not enough, he does think he’s moving forward.

He doesn’t hesitate to answer when asked what he’ll do when he gets out.

“I’m going to get a job and be independent,” he said.

John Tompkins is senior reporter for The Facts. Contact him at (979) 237-0149.

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JUVENILE JUSTICE

Number of juvenile arrests statewide

1997          179,631

2005          141,113

Number of youth offenders certified as adults

1997          467

2005          178

Youth offenders sent to Texas Youth Commission

2002          2,448

2006          2,738

Youth offenders sent to TYC from Brazoria County

2002          29

2007          13